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SXSW Day 1: Predicting The Future, The Latest in Sports VR and The Next Phase of The Internet

Clemenger Group Australia and New Zealand reports on the ground for day 1 of SXSW

Clemenger Group Australia and New Zealand has sent a cross-disciplined crack-team to SXSW 2018 in Austin, Texas. Together, they're bringing daily updates for Little Black Book and Campaign Brief readers, featuring only the very best of the conference.

The Anatomy of a Trend

When
Carla Buzsai started off by saying "Anna Wintour knows nothing about
trends", the whole room was hooked. But, considering she's the founding
editor-in-chief of Huffington Post UK and now Managing Director of WGSN,
a leading trend forecasting company - she can back it up.

Carla
discussed how WGSN discovers and defines upcoming trends - the laborious
global research (largely ethnographic) that they all bring together,
put on post-its, reshape, interrogate and reform again and again and
again.

That's all well and good, but a few of us were left wondering if this
benefited us at all. The "a-ha" moment was when she started talking
about the imminent ripple effect trends have on products, people,
experience and marketing. For example, data says more women will shift
to wearing high heels. Obviously, this will affect the manufacturers of
shoes, but what materials will be demanded? Will the length of pants
change? Will there be a higher demand for podiatrists?

Very
quickly you begin to see how these global trends, and the ripples they
create, bring about opportunity for marketers, if used correctly. So, I
know what you're thinking: what's hot for 2019?

Apparently,
expect to see the emergence of mirrors that double as health assistants,
matte black homewares, mint green fashion, vegan-friendly materials,
vegetarian meat and hiking is the new Yoga.

Who would've thought?

----

VR in the Sports Industry

I
know right... SXSW. VR, AR, Drones, Bots, A.I. - all the buzzwords and
tech hype! But it just so happens that the most interesting session
today was about exactly that: VR in the Sports Industry. However, it was
refreshingly different.

Rather than just giving up a spiel about
how shit-hot VR is (when we all know the adoption-rates are low,
there's scaling issues and the headsets haven't quite met expectations
yet), Derek Belch, the founder of STRIVR chatted about how they use VR
to train NFL Quarterbacks. By simulating plays in VR, quarterbacks can
read defensive lines and identify play opportunities and threats--like
blitzes--off the field.

Vocational training is a growing subset
of the VR industry, with brands like Walmart using it to induct
employees into the store environment without disrupting the day-to-day.

Sports may be one of the spaces we see true adoption of the technology. Maybe then it'll filter into general society.

----

The Shadow Side of Human Centered Design

The
practice of human-centered design is something that, when done
perfectly, we shouldn't feel at all. That's all well and nice, but
humans are flawed and things are shit sometimes.

So, speaker
Melis Senova challenged the weary-eyed early-morning audience to better
their design practice, by thinking darker. Her talk was about the other
side of design. The side where governments don't govern that well, or
relief aid isn't distributed that well, or life isn't peachy 24/7.

And
it's only when you understand and embrace all the potential evils--from
the failures to the ways your design could be misappropriated--that
you'll be able to design a true solution.

Senova's presentation
culminated in a very poignant statement: if we keep designing through
rose-tinted glasses, we're only designing for half of the human
experience.

It may be bleak, but she's got a point.

----

Why Ethereum Will Change the World

This
interview-style chat with Joseph Lubin was a hot-topic session. Mainly
because he helped create blockchain. And, from that, Ethereum.

But
rather than adding to the long list of "future of cryptocurrency blah
blah blah" presentations, Lubin opted to showcase the good and described
his ambition for these world-shifting ideas: the next phase of the
internet.

The packed room listened to Lubin describe a world of
shared collaborative infrastructure. A world where online communities
are formed around shared interests - like curing a disease. A
decentralized, global network where no-one profits more than others.

In
this next phase, makers share their wares with fans directly. Plus,
anyone with unused hard drive space could rent it out. For payment
they'd get tokens redeemable for online services. Like a trade-economy
carnival game, where the prizes are anything from Amazon vouchers to the
Adobe suite.

Don't tell my mother I'm in advertising, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.

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